This New AI Tool By MyHeritage Can Make Your Photos Move
‘MyHeritage’, the famous genealogy site has launched a unique artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool that can transform old pictures into creepy videos. This recently launched AI service is known as ‘Deep Nostalgia’ and it makes use of the technology that was licensed from an Israeli firm called D-ID. This firm specialises in video reenactment using deep learning. Deep Nostalgia uses this particular technology in order to animate the faces in old photos and create a high-quality video. This AI-based tool has, however, become a current hot trend on Twitter as a lot of people have been trying to create the creepiest videos from historical pictures, apparently.
This AI-based tool called Deep Nostalgia has been introduced by the genealogy company MyHeritage. This service does resemble the iOS Live Photos feature, where users can add a few seconds of video to the photo in order to assist smartphone photographers in finding the best shot.
However, unlike the iOS Live Photos feature, Deep Nostalgia can click pictures from any camera and bring them to life. This program utilises the pre-recorded driver videos of facial movements and implements the video that suits the still photo being edited the best. The basic intention behind this tool is to be able to see the photos of deceased loved ones in “action,” which sounds like an amazing idea.
In a nutshell, it creates a realistic depiction of how a particular person from an old photo would have looked in case they were captured on video instead.
Along with bringing the old or historical pictures back to life, this tool can easily be used to animate coloured photographs. MyHeritage said in a blog post that their AI-based tool works fairly well on both black and white photos and coloured photos. In addition to this, Deep Nostalgia works well on both colourised photos and photos whose colours were restored using MyHeritage In Colour.
In order to make use of this AI-based service, users can sign up for a free account on MyHeritage and then upload a picture they want animated. From this point, the process is pretty much automated; this site enhances the photo before animating it and making a gif. The official site of this service clarifies that they do not provide the pictures uploaded to any third parties, and also display a message on the main page that says, “photos uploaded without completing signup are automatically deleted to protect your privacy.”
Hence, without any worries, users can just go to this web address ‘myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia’ upload a picture and then follow the instructions provided on the screen. MyHeritage has announced that it has various possible sequences of gestures that can be used on a photo.
The program has already grabbed the top spot on recent Twitter trends and is slowly becoming a potential meme-generator on Twitter, with users trying to use this AI to its fullest. People are using photos of ancient statues and paintings and even though most of these results are fascinating, some of them can easily induce a nightmare.
Deep Nostalgia can only animate faces and thus, the pictures uploaded should be single headshots and not full pictures or any random object. MyHeritage website allows users to upload only five photos for free and post that, users will have to register with a paid account to continue using the services. Even though people still have concerns about security and other such issues, but one thing is for sure, this AI is scarily good.
The company also announced in its blog post that this AI analyses the orientation of the head and the direction of the eyes in the picture, and automatically chooses which driver will be best suited and then applies it to the selected face. And the users can get a high-quality short video animation or gif as a result.